Structural analysis of dialects, sub-dialects, and sub-sub-dialects

In China, there are hundred kinds of dialects. By traditional dialectology, they are classified into seven big dialect regions and most of them also have many sub-dialects and sub-sub-dialects. As they are different in various linguistic aspects, people from different dialect regions often cannot communi-cate orally. But for the sub-dialects of one dialect region, al-though they are sometimes still mutually unintelligible, more common features are shared. In this paper, a dialect pronun-ciation structure, which has been used successfully in dialect-based speaker classification in our previous work [1], is exam-ined for the task of speaker classification and distance measure-ment among cities based on sub-dialects of Mandarin. Using the finals of the dialectal utterances of a specific list of written characters, a dialect pronunciation structure is built for every speaker in a data set and these speakers are classified based on the distances among their structures. Then, the results of clas-sifying 16 Mandarin speakers based on their sub-dialects show that they are linguistically classified with little influence of their age and gender. Finally, distances among sub-sub-dialects are similarly calculated and evaluated. All the results show high validity and accordance to linguistic studies. Index Terms: Sub-dialects of Mandarin, pronunciation struc-ture, speaker classificatio